«I have a dream», Graffiti in N Prieur Street, Faubourg Tremé, New Orleans, Louisiana According to New Orleans’s official tourist agency.

«The Faubourg Tremé or as it is more frequently referred to, Tremé, is not only America’s oldest black neighborhood but was the site of significant economic, cultural, political, social and legal events that have literally shaped the course of events in Black America for the past two centuries. Yet, few outside of New Orleans except for scholars and historians know its enourmous importance to Americans of African descent ». The neighborhood has at least three dominant positive identities : as a place of unique African American cultural performance traditions ; as a place of significant African American political achievement and as a place of historic architecture. Tremé is a neighborhood of colorful parades and funerals. It a place of secondlines parades, DJs, jazz music and jazz funerals, corner bars and black Mardi Gras. Tremé is also noted for the radical political activism carried out by its Creole of Color residents in the nineteenth century. Though they may be enjoyable for both partecipants and spectators, these traditions do not exist simply to entertain. They also serve as the basis for community building and political resistence. As Stephan Nathan Haymes writes, «Within the black urban communities place making and therefore the production of public spaces is linked with day-to-day survival. But it is within the realm of day-to-day life, of daily survival, that black urban communities create public spaces that allow them to develop self-definition or social identities that are linked to a politics of resistance. Over the past forty years, Tremé’s longterm black community has chosen to fight for its culture. Michael E. Crutcher JR.